The hunt is on for more observations that can parse what happened during those first 100 million years, whether from asteroid samples, clusters of primordial asteroid families, or craters on the Moon and Mars. 'Now, the question is, was it a few million ye ars after or 80 million years?' Morbidelli says. 'Honestly we don't know.'

Voskos, I., Vika, E., 2020. Prehistoric human remains reviewed: Palaeopathology and palaeodiet in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Cyprus, Limassol district. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 29, 102128.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X19305425 The current paper presents the results from the recent reexamination of osteological material deriving from Ceramic Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites of the Limassol district, Cyprus. The available skeletal material was macroscopically examined in order to identify possible palaeopathological lesions, while stable isotope analyses (carbon and nitrogen) were conducted aiming to reconstruct past diets. Although only a small percentage of the samples provided acceptable collagen, this study still offers valuable insights into the economic strategies and everyday practices during the mid-5th to late-4th millennium B.C. It is also noted, that nearly all the available skeletal material from the Ceramic Neolithic period on the island was sampled. This study, therefore, provides a useful basis for future comparative research.

Wadley, L., Backwell, L., d'Errico, F., Sievers, C., 2020. Cooked starchy rhizomes in Africa 170 thousand years ago. Science 367, 87-91.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6473/87.abstract Abstract: Plant carbohydrates were undoubtedly consumed in antiquity, yet starchy geophytes were seldom preserved archaeologically. We report evidence for geophyte exploitation by early humans from at least Hypoxis 170,000 years ago. Charred rhizomes from Border Cave, South Africa, were identified to the genus L. Hypoxis angustifolia by comparing the morphology and anatomy of ancient and modern rhizomes. Lam., the likely taxon, proliferates in relatively well-watered areas of sub-Saharan Africa and in Yemen, Arabia. In those Hypoxis areas and possibly farther north during moist periods, rhizomes would have provided reliable and familiar carbohydrate sources for mobile groups. Editor's summary: Middle Stone Age cooking. Early evidence of cooked starchy plant food is sparse, yet the et al. consumption of starchy roots is likely to have been a key innovation in the human diet. Wadley report the Hypoxis identification of whole, charred rhizomes of plants of the genus from Border Cave, South Africa, dated up to 170,000 years ago. These archaeobotanical remains represent the earliest direct evidence for the cooking Hypoxis of underground storage organs. The edible rhizomes appear to have been cooked and consumed in the Hypoxis cave by the Middle Stone Age humans at the site. has a wide geographical distribution, suggesting that Homo sapiens the rhizomes could have been a ready and reliable carbohydrate source for in Africa, perhaps facilitating the mobility of human populations.

Wagner, P., 2020. High-resolution dating of Paleozoic fossils. Science 367, 249.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6475/249.abstract Discussions about the quality of the fossil record frequently focus on completeness - that is, the proportion of species that existed for which scientists have fossil samples. An equally important aspect of quality is how finely the ages of fossils and durations of major evolutionary events can be resolved. Paleontologists and other biologists typically date fossils using the general ages of the chronostratigraphic units assigned to the rock strata yielding the fossils. For example, if a fossiliferous bed comes from the Rhuddanian Gasworks Sandstone, then et al. 1 the ages assigned to the fossils are usually 443.8 to 440.8 million years. On page 272 of this issue, Fan ( ) 2 report on their use of constrained optimization (CONOP) ( ) in biochronological analyses of fossil-bearing layers containing 11,000+ marine invertebrate species from 3000+ sections of sedimentary rocks, which constrain ages to a fraction of that range.